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Session abstract:

An introduction to five techniques in User Experience, namely Personas, Red routes, Card sorting, Sketching and Mental models. There are more techniques, but we only have 45 minutes :)

Personas: You have to know who you are designing the product for. Even if your product is aimed at the general population, you will still have different groups of people using it for different purposes. There’s no such thing as an average user. Personas are different from the marketing segmentation in the sense that marketing will group users according to how to approach them in order to market the product to them. Personas group users by how (and why) they use the product.
Red routes: An analogy taken from the concept of red routes in London. The goal of this technique is recognizing crucial functionalities of the product in order to make sure there are no obstacles standing in the way of working with those functionalities. It is always easy to say YES to a new features. What we need to do is learn how to say NO to anything except the most important ones.
Card sorting: Deals with what goes where, what group it belongs to, what other functionalities belong to this same group, etc. There are two approaches to the card sorting - either we define groups first and try to fit functionalities into them, or we group functionalities into anything that seems logical and then try to describe the each group. Card sorting is often done with the users being involved in the process.